What Is It? In January 2008 Marvel collapsed their line of several Spider-Man titles down to just Amazing Spider-Man, which accelerated to releasing three issues a month from a rotating cast of writers starting with #546. This coincided with a minor reset of some details of Spider-Man’s continuity – more on that below.

While the story arc “Brand New Day” ran from #546 to 564, the title is commonly used to refer to the entire period of accelerated schedule with multiple writers, which ran through #647 in December 2010 – three entire years comprised of 102 issues of Amazing Spider-Man!

Past Ranking: This year is the book’s debut placement in the ballot results.

Creators: Many!

The rotating writers considered to be Spider-Man’s steering brain-trust consistently including Dan Slott, Marc Guggenheim, Bob Gale, and Zeb Wells – though others like Mark Waid and Joe Kelly also contributed arcs in this period.

For a full map of how the Brand New Day period could fit into omnibus volumes, see the end of this post.

Can you read it right now? Yes! Marvel has begun to recollect Big Time in a series of Complete Collections. A first omnibus probably wouldn’t cover all three collections. See the Guide to Spider-Man for full physical collecting info.

Plus, every one of these issues is available on Marvel Unlimited!

The Details:

To talk about this run, we have to first talk about the story that immediately precedes it – “One More Day.”

“One More Day” is one of the most-hated Spider-Man stories of all time, neck-and-neck with its later sequel “One Moment In Time.”

Fans tend to dislike any revisions to their favorite elements of continuity, but this one was particularly egregious – not only breaking up Spider-Man and Mary Jane, but retroactively causing their marriage to cease to exist due to a very out-of-character deal with a literal devil. Their relationship and all of their stories continued to exist – just not their marriage.

The story did come with a few fringe benefits. The world would forget Spider-Man’s secret identity (recently revealed in Civil War), but that meant he was now in hiding due to the Superhuman Registration Act. It revived Harry Osborn from the dead. And, it resulted in the cancellation of all of Marvel’s other Spider-Man titles, which allowed them to accelerate Amazing Spider-Man to be released three times a month.

Amazing Spider-Man #546 starts with a blank slate for Peter Parker. He’s a single, hanging out with Harry Osborn, and looking for a new job while on a 100-day streak of avoiding putting on his spandex (since no Spider-Man means no profitable photos for the Daily Bugle). The no-Spidey streak quickly comes to an end due to a trio of circumstances in the first issue, including Peter Parker giving J. Jonah Jameson a heart attack by finally talking back!

In a way, it feels like we’ve travelled back in time to some decades-past era of Amazing Spider-Man as we see a Peter Parker who is short on cash and relatively unconcerned with romance. The fact that the issues came out three-a-month should be invisible to us in retrospect, but in hindsight these brief arcs feel focused and even a bit compressed compared to the typical comic of the period. There was no need to foreground a number of minor plot details to keep readers engaged and drag out each story because the entire point was to tell a complete story every month-and-a-half!

The snappy stories were accompanied by some stellar artwork – perhaps the best run of artists Spider-Man had seen since the early 90s. While Marvel has never skimped on assigning strong artists to Spidey, in this proposed omnibus alone Marvel cycled through over a dozen of their A-list pencilers from the period.

Spider-Man’s disappearance and sudden return sets up a string of events that bring in villains including Mr. Negative, Hammerhead, and Norman Osborn’s Thunderbolts. Plus, there are new characters Menace, Screwball, the mutated Freak, and a new generation of Kraven – not to mention the NYC mob. The run also finds Park’s daytime career undergoing a transformation away from just being the guy who takes photos of Spider-Man – which results in him crossing paths with the starlet Mary Jane Watson(!).

Fans were slow to warm to this period back in 2008 due to the sour taste of “One More Day” still lingering in their mouths. Reading it almost a decade later, the revitalization of Spider-Man storytelling eclipses a single preceding arc that’s better left forgotten.

Will we see this omnibus in 2018? No. If Marvel is going to start to omnibus any recent Spider-Man, it’s going to be from within Dan Slott’s era as the exclusive author.

Would I recommend buying it? Probably not, unless you’re just in the omnibus game for the artwork. I enjoy this period of Spider-Man, but I don’t think the initial run of stories in this era are especially memorable.

Brand New Day Mapping

I didn’t cover Brand New Day for my suggested Omnibus Mapping, opting for Big Time instead.

Oops!

Now, in order to figure out what ought to go in this omnibus, we’ve got to map the entire period.

This run was originally covered in Volume 12 through Volume 33 of Amazing Spider-Man’s collected editions – 22 volumes of books that were around 200 pages a piece. That means we’d likely be looking at a chunk of three omnibus set to cover the entire period.

I could see Marvel leaving off #638-647 and Web of Spider-Man (2009) #12 from that last collection, as it wouldn’t entirely make sense to collect “One Moment In Time” in an omnibus series that didn’t begin with “One More Day.”

I could also see Marvel finding a way to fit in a series of connected mini-series that did not all star Spider-Man that ran starting at the end of 2009, effectively creating a third ongoing Spider-Man title alongside Amazing and Web. Adding these issues could give Marvel a logical reason to split up The Gauntlet into two volumes.

Those miniseries are:

Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Anti-Venom – New Ways To Live (2009) #1-3 starting in November 2009 (parallel to #604-607)

Reader Interactions

Comments

Great post. I think you might be thinking of the Big TIme Complete Collections volume 3 for Feb 2015. Brand New Day has a complete collection volume 3 coming out in June. I don’t know if Volume 4 has been solicited yet, but it looks like they are trying to bring them out up to the Big Time Era. Probably need 2 more BND completes to get us there.

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